


The Tomb of the Fallen

by dragonofdispair, Rizobact



Series: Transformers Fantasy AU Novels/Novellas [9]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Curses, Empties, Gen, Reincarnation, Slice of Life But Horrible, Time does not heal all wounds, Undead, Violence, all the violence, halloween fic, major character deaths, minor OC deaths, not a happy ending tho, very slow build
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:29:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27313378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonofdispair/pseuds/dragonofdispair, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rizobact/pseuds/Rizobact
Summary: Winds howl across the blood soaked fields. The great war machines lie abandoned, sucked deep into the mud.Serve the master. Protect the tomb.It was all there was and all they needed, until the master — Megatronus Prime — didn’t return. Cursed to defend the tomb of their enemy, Prowl and Jazz continue to wait as the centuries leave them behind.
Series: Transformers Fantasy AU Novels/Novellas [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/757134
Comments: 38
Kudos: 33





	The Tomb of the Fallen

**Author's Note:**

> We played an online game of _The Skeletons_ by Jason Morningstar. As usual it was creepy, sad, and narratively interesting. So we’re sharing a cleaned up and edited version of it with you. Happy Halloween… you know, if you manage to stop crying after this. XD ~dragon
> 
> The game lent itself to Transformers surprisingly well! 10/10 would recommend if you like freeform storytelling games, especially melancholy introspective ones :) Happy Halloween! (it’s so hard hurting my favorites like this even when it’s absolutely fascinating stuff to contemplate lol) ~Rizobact
> 
> Beta’d by ladydragon76

##  The Unsealed Tomb

.

.

.

A wounded soldier took shelter in the doorway of the tomb, and curiosity drew him deeper. Unbeknownst to him, it was no simple grave. The barrow constructed beneath the battlefield where the great demigod had fallen, filled with dead ends and equally deadly traps. It had been designed to defend itself and protect the demigod’s remains, a place wholly unwelcoming to any visitor regardless of their intent.

In his ignorance, the first trap nearly took the soldier’s head off when he stepped on the pressure plate and released the heavy swinging blade from its recess in the wall. He jumped clear at the last second, the sudden movement jarring his injuries, and he gasped in pain as much as surprise. The blade vanished as fast as it had appeared, but it took the soldier a moment before he was able to start moving again.

He hadn’t gone much farther when he encountered a rune of hypnosis; meant to ensnare the unwary, it held him immobile for a short time. When nothing else happened he shook off the effect, destroyed the rune, and moved deeper into the tomb.

The corridors were big, the walls and ceilings spaced to comfortably accommodate mechs up to twice the soldier’s size. More importantly, however, they were comfortably spaced for the tomb’s guardians: those bound to protect the tomb in the service of the master, bidden to walk the halls on an endless patrol in search of intruders… and they had the scent of one now.

The soldier, still dripping lifeblood from his injuries, was a beacon to the horde of undead Empties. Following the call to protect the tomb, they followed the trail of vital fluids and harmlessly sprung traps in pursuit of the intruder, closing in on him slowly until one of the traps finally managed to do its work: a volley of arrows fired from multiple stone-mounted crossbows, covering all angles and leaving no room for escape. The soldier screamed as the bolts pierced his armor and lodged in his frame, sending agony shooting through him. Poison seeped into his veins. He collapsed, riddled with arrows and already able to see the gray cast creeping up his legs. 

The leader of the Empties, a specimen indistinguishable from the rest except by a beautiful silver torc that rested on his neck, lurched forward with his blunt, silver sword raised. 

The dying soldier blinked up at him as he stepped out of the mass of Empties in the corridor. “General Prowl?”

The words meant nothing, and Silver Torc delivered the killing blow. The master’s will was done.

Another Empty laughed from the shadows, amused by the plethora of arrows in the recently deceased mech’s frame. 

“It’s the same!” he said out loud, the sound echoing down the hall as he indicated the number of arrows embedded in both the corpse and the round shield strapped to his arm; a distinguishing feature, and Silver Torc thought of him as Arrow Shield because of it. Focusing directly on him, singling his thoughts out from the horde, Silver Torc could see that Arrow Shield thought the parallel of projectiles was poetic in a way the soldier’s death was not, for death had been a fact of life even before the magic geas, and now the magic geas  _ was  _ death. “It  _ is _ funny!” Arrow Shield insisted in the face of Silver Torc’s silence. “Geez. Tough crowd, though I can’t say I’m surprised. You’re usually  _ so _ lively!”

Arrow Shield had strange, complicated thoughts, and Silver Torc preferred to ignore them.

It was not with regret, but a grim silent duty that Silver Torc cleaned his sword as best he could, then followed back along the intruder’s trail to set pedestals and their displays of trinkets to rights. He moved calmly and without rage at the intruder who had desecrated the halls, restoring what he could. Carved murals along the walls of the maze depicted the dark master’s rise and fall and eventual rise again. The optics had been gouged out in some and prophecies of immortality had been slashed in others, but the damage could not take away from the glorious story they told. How the master had sought power and gathered followers. How he’d raised an army of Empties and other, decaying things that Silver Torc did not know the names of. How his army clashed again and again with those of his enemies, seizing one victory after another. Each image depicted the dark master triumphant. Even in the scene of his mortal defeat, he was a figure of power. Death was not the end. 

Arrow Shield trailed after Silver Torc, somehow resetting the traps the intruder had managed to survive before his luck ran out. He looked at the desecration only hesitantly until he realized that the geas didn’t punish them for failing to prevent the damage to the tomb. After that his movements were sure, not missing a step with the sometimes complicated mechanics that Silver Torc didn’t understand.

When he arrived at the entrance, Silver Torc discovered that the intruder hadn’t come alone. An old mech, bent and faded with age waited there, bearing the same insignia as the soldier. The first intruder had been a personal guard of some sort then, scouting ahead while the older mech did not penetrate any deeper into the tomb than the entrance hall. 

Protect the tomb.

A simple warning for the mech to leave might have resolved the situation, but the magic demanded death. Drawing his sword, Silver Torc advanced on the elder. Arrow Shield stood ready behind him, positioned so that in the unlikely event the mech survived his encounter with Silver Torc, the only way farther into the tomb would be through him.

And though none of the Empties made any demand that he retreat, the elder mech hurriedly backed away. The guardians stopped advancing when he exited the barrow, taking himself outside the bounds of the tomb. Silver Torc stared impassively, and as they watched each other, a memory stirred. The first, for Silver Torc had no memory of life before guarding the tomb. He placed one rusted hand on his chest, where a cracked, and peeling decal could still be seen on his decayed plating. It was the same insignia as the elder bore, and the soldier, and though he almost thought he wanted it to, it meant nothing. There was no life before the tomb. Nothing came before being bestowed with the master’s gift and service. 

The elder mirrored his action, his hand coming to rest on his own chest. A sadness came over his face. “I wish I had the means to free you,” he said regretfully. “No one who fell defending Cybertron from His evil deserves to spend eternity enslaved to it.”

Free? Silver Torc did not understand the word any more than he had understood the soldier calling out to him. His hand dropped, and he waited silently, sword ready. 

Dimly he realized that Arrow Shield was more self aware. The geas demanded death to intruders, but this mech was no longer intruding and… he had the same symbol on his chest. It meant something to him as well. Actually  _ meant  _ something, though Silver Torc didn’t know what. He didn’t think Arrow Shield knew either. 

“I’ll try and send someone,” the elder went on. “One of the mages, or a priest perhaps. Someone who can break the curse and unbind your sparks so you may continue to the Allspark.”

Silver Torc didn’t recognize the word, but Arrow Shield shook his head. In his thoughts the Allspark meant something good, but it wasn’t for them. Not anymore.

“Be strong,” the old mech implored. “Do not give up hope.” Then he turned away, and walked into the sunlight. 

Something about the encounter moved Arrow Shield to action. Without warning, he drew back his arm and hurled the bearded axe in his hand wildly at the disappearing figure with a shout of rage. It was too long a throw from the back of the entrance hall, however, and the poorly aimed projectile struck only the doorframe. The blade separated from the handle and the now broken axe hit the ground in two pieces.

Silver Torc looked on without judgement. 

A decade passed and all was quiet. No one else came. 

The tomb, the battlefield, were forgotten by those outside.

Inside, the guardians were left alone with the intricate carvings covering the walls of the maze. Concealed among the murals, inlays and reliefs in one of the chambers was a mechanism that opened the door to a secret passage. The tomb guardians rarely went in there during their aimless patrols. For anyone clever enough or lucky enough to find it — and survive both the traps and guardians, which no one ever did — the comparatively unadorned path led to an equally simple room containing a single weapon. 

Silver Torc mused that it should have been destroyed, or hidden away by the remainder of the master’s enemies. Yet the Requiem Blaster was enshrined here, waiting for the master to rise and reclaim it. It was precious to the guardians. The only thing more important in this tomb than the master’s weapon was his corpse. The Requiem Blaster had to remain ready for him, so that he could resume his crusade and conquer Cybertron… or so Silver Torc inferred in his more lucid moments from the carvings.

At the heart of the maze was the central chamber, the final resting place of the great demigod’s sarcophagus. Though he had never seen it, Silver Torc knew his body lay within, waiting for the day his spark returned to the world. All around the raised dais lay the master’s treasure, piles of gold and jewels and other things his followers had left when the tomb was sealed. Above the sarcophagus and filing most of the central chamber stood an enormous statue of the demigod himself, looking up toward the stars. Across from the statue, glaring down from the wall was a relief carving of Unicron, the god he served. Master and servant, etched in stone and metal, stared unceasing at each other as time passed.

In an alcove off the northern wall there was a beautiful book upon an ornate pedestal. It was a hefty thing, bound in thick metal the color of lava. The only thing on the cover was an arcane glyph, which Silver Torc did not know. When he opened the book, the words — if words they were — swam around the page. He could not read them, though as the years wound into centuries he tried. All he knew was that this book had something to do with how they had been bound. 

For this was the tomb of Megatronus. The Empties were bound to defend it from all intruders. Animated frames with rust eating at their plating, age weighing down their struts. Most limped along on broken, rusted legs. Some were missing arms or hands. One was missing its head. All of them were devoid of speech or thought, save the two (un)fortunates aware of their fates: Silver Torc and Arrow Shield. 

That minimal awareness told Silver Torc he was just a body and magic, a tormented semblance of life, but he knew it was a gift. Service was his reward, though for what, he didn’t know. And in the tomb, the number of the dead grew over time, each tormented, grayed out husk a silent witness to the enduring evil of the master.

.

.

.

##  The Time of Dust

.

.

.

Memories stirred in the darkness. Thoughts were fleeting. Moments of introspection were ephemeral. Silver Torc remembered the dark master. Awe and terror and fear were all more than worthy of standing in a demigod’s presence. He remembered reverence as he kneeled to the Pri—

He stood upon a bluff, looking down upon an army of the undead, all risen to fight for the dark master and then turned to give the order to his own sold— 

He crawled from the pile of corpses on the battlefield and looked at the circle of mages who had summoned him from the darkness and the grave. The silver torc already sat upon his neck and his silver sword rested easily in his hand. Grave goods, but not the weapon he should have had. The acid pe— “You have been chosen for eternal service,” they said and the knowledge he had been granted a gift settled into his struts, overriding all other thoughts. “You are special,” the speaker said, gazing on Silver Torc fondly. “A leader among all the guardians. Protect  _ our _ master.”

The master must be protected, his frame kept intact and away from his many enemies. They would finish destroying him if they could. They would take the Requiem Blaster if they found it. It was Silver Torc’s job to ensure his master’s resurrection came, that all was ready. It was a sacred duty. It was his role, his function.

It accompanied him on his patrols, giving him purpose along with his duty. He would defend the master against all intruders, whether by combat or coup de grace. He would serve the master in death as he had in life. 

He found nothing in the traps. None of them had gone off. And yet, there was something here that should not be.

No matter. Silver Torc saw the intruder as he finished a patrol of the maze’s outer perimeter and returned to the central chamber. He drew his sword and advanced on the large, translucent flightframe standing over the sarcophagus. He called for the others through the spellwork that bound them all, the shambling frames of the others who had been raised and enspelled into service, to help take down this foe.

The mech looked down from his contemplation of the great statue of the master to the tomb’s guardian. His gaze held something like pity and it stirred a rare moment of emotion in Silver Torc. How dare he pity him! The arrival of reinforcements had no visible impact on the flightframe, which stood to reason. He was well equipped to take on multiple foes at once, his plating bulked out and protected by additional armor. Shadows marked its luminous surface where dents and punctures might have been, but for the most part it appeared to be intact if not fully corporeal.

Arrow Shield’s thoughts intruded in the spell-bonds as he entered the room as well. He thought the mech looked vaguely familiar, but Silver Torc demanded that the confrontation have his attention to the exclusion of any further contemplation. His broken axe, little more than a narrow club and an overlarge knife with no good handle, weren’t the best weapons for the job but he brandished them nonetheless.

“I know you,” the overlarge mech said, backing away from Silver Torc’s advance. He stepped through offerings and debris without care, unhindered, while the determined guardians had to go around to avoid tripping. “The Unyielding General. Where is your proper weapon? That is not the one you died with.” He looked around at the tomb, optics falling on the statue of the dark demigod again. “I don’t know if I should gloat or not. This is—”

Heedless of his rambling, Silver Torc swung his sword. The blade went right through him. 

“—a curse,” the mech finished. “One I did not expect to join our enemies in.”

Enemies. That was why his armor was familiar. Not that it mattered to the curse: former friend or former foe, anyone who did not belong to the tomb must die. Silver Torc saw Arrow Shield standing to the sidelines as he swung again to no effect. The other Empty frowned when another of their number rushed the hulking ghost and crashed headlong into the wall behind him. He was an intruder. He had to die but was already dead.

How were they going to kill him again?

“Lies,” Silver Torc croaked in a voice like dust, the first words he had uttered in the dark of the tomb. Perhaps the first words he had ever uttered. “The master’s gifts are…” 

The ghost’s expression was now distinctly pitying, and it only fueled Silver Torc’s anger. “You do not know how it pains me to know, finally, that Unicron’s ‘eternal life’ was only ever a curse, and yet hear you of all mechs call it a gift, General.” 

“It  _ is _ a gift,” Silver Torc growled with more strength. “It  _ has _ to be!”

“It isn’t.” Arrow Shield’s voice sounded different without his usual laughter, the words coming out dark and bitter. Ringing in his head was a feeling he hadn’t been able to describe before, but had carried with him since he had risen: a sense that they no longer belonged. “We’re damned. Always have been.”

Another Empty devoid of thought attacked, succeeding only in hitting the sarcophagus. The ghost ignored it and regarded Silver Torc and Arrow Shield instead, curious. “Interesting that there are two of you,” he mused. “Usually there is only one commander.” 

“We have a duty. A purpose! It can’t be for nothing!” Silver Torc shrieked. 

The ghost looked around. The quiet tomb had become chaos, overrun with Empties only capable of hitting each other. 

The magic demanded they attack, even when the action would be useless. Silver Torc did not know how Arrow Shield was resisting. Or why he would want to.  _ Serve the master. Protect the tomb. _ Their arms ached with the need to attack. 

“Why are you here?” Arrow Shield asked, fingers tightening around his club. “You haven’t been bound here. You can  _ leave.”  _

The ghost turned his attention on him. “Officer… Jazz, was it? I came,” he ignored Silver Torc’s frantic swing through him with the silver sword to look up at the dark master’s statue, then up further to the carving of the dark god’s visage glaring down. “I’m not sure. To pay my respects. To… find some answers.” 

“There are no answers here for anyone.” 

_Protect the tomb!_ _The invader must die!_

_ “ _ The invader’s already dead!” Arrow Shield exclaimed, evaluating the situation for himself in defiance of the spell. “Unless…” Frustrated, he threw the head of his axe at the ghost (and as a bonus, knocked one of the blundering mindless Empties off the sarcophagus). “Maybe what you want is in there,” he said and pointed to the alcove and the prominently displayed tome there. 

“No! Stay away from that!” Silver Torc attacked the ghost again, flying right through him. 

He was ignored. “I remember this,” the ghost whispered, taking smooth, striding steps that almost floated. The corridor was not quite big enough for him, but he didn’t notice or mind as he stopped in front of the alcove with one wing disappearing into the wall beside him. It phased right through a depiction of a mountain crumbling to the master’s might. The ghost held his hand above the book, and the pages moved, as if from a breeze. 

The pages settled. He looked at the mass of bound Empties, his gaze resting on the two who spoke. Arrow Shield trembled with the effort to stand his ground, while Silver Torc picked himself up and readied himself for another attack. His normally dead-dark optics glowed faintly with rage. 

“I cannot unbind you,” the ghost said to them, though mostly to Arrow Shield. “What’s done is done, until the spell runs its course and Lord Megatronus rises or reincarnates.”

Arrow Shield cried out like he was in pain. “Then raise him!”  _ Raise him and free us! _

“I am one mortal mage; he is a god!” the ghost shouted, flinging his hand through the air, the book and the pedestal. An instant too late for it to have been moved by the contact, the book went flying toward the sarcophagus. It smacked Silver Torc hard enough to send the seething undead guardian flying back into the far wall. “Our powers flowed  _ from _ him. Our spells came  _ from _ him. Had we the power, we would have raised him the instant the other Primes struck him down, but we cannot!”

A frustrated, helpless growl ripped from Arrow Shield’s reanimated engine and he swung his club at the angry ghost. He swung again at the wall when it was all he managed to hit, then again at their opponent, angry, embittered, and overwhelmed by the demand to protect the tomb.

“I’m sorry,” the specter said, calming. He backed further into the corridor, both wings now fading into the stone, to escape the ineffectual strikes of the club. “You are right: there are no answers here. I had hoped, but… I will leave you to what little peace you can find in these walls.”

Arrow Shield chased him down the hall, unable not to pursue him until he fully left the boundaries of the tomb. Silver Torc followed with the others for the same purpose and their footsteps echoed like thunder on the stone, but he didn’t register their presence until the curse loosened its grip on his mind.

Arrow Shield turned to look at the others crowding the corridor with him. Most were already wandering off, dismissed by Silver Torc back to their patrols, but the commander lingered.

“This is our purpose,” the doorwinged Empty said firmly, and he made it echo through Arrow Shield’s being. “The tomb, the relic, the master must not come to harm.” 

“They won’t.”

Silver Torc was satisfied with that answer. The magic would see to it, damn what they wanted along with them until the master rose or reincarnated. 

However long that took.

Arrow shield trotted after him as he turned back to his patrol. “Hey! I think I’m Jazz. That’s what that ghost called me, and it feels familiar.” 

Silver Torc ignored him.

“I mean… names are important, dig? It’s nice to have something other than  _ Arrow Shield. _ Not that I’m going to think less of you for still going by Silver Torc.” 

They lurched through the corridors like that, until Silver Torc sent Jazz back to his  _ own _ patrol with a mental command.

Centuries passed. A thick layer of dust and rust covered everything, ground down and then kicked up by the shambling undead walking unheeding over the corpses of the truly dead. Vermin and tomb robbers made their way into the tomb, but few such encounters registered to its guardians. They killed them without thought, and then forgot about them.

Occasionally though… 

Faint giggling echoed through the maze of traps. From where he had sunk down on his rusted haunches, sword resting tiredly across his knees, Silver Torc stirred to defend the tomb. The geas took hold over his frame, but his gaze remained sightless, his mind elsewhere. 

Remembering. 

_ Standing on a bluff, overlooking an army of undead, he turned to give the signal to… _

_ Giggling. A slim, red mech with paramedic’s symbols on his doors led him by the hand through a maze of crystals, glinting in the sunlight. They were both giggling. It was their two-week anniversary. Such a small amount of time, but the newness made each passing day seem like a milestone worth celebrating.  _

_ “Prowl, my love?” the red mech whispered, drawing him close.  _

_ “Moondance,” he responded, feeling the alien warmth of his lover’s arms. He is…  _

The geas washed the scene away with cold reality, taking the memory with it. The traps had failed to take out the two distracted explorers, and Silver Torc altered his course to cut them off. At his command, the other shambling wrecks did the same throughout the maze, converging on the intruders. 

Silver Torc was in position when the two mechs entered the hall, oblivious to the danger ahead. Lamplight flickered in the gloom, its circle too small to illuminate the Empties closing in behind with Arrow Shield at the front of the pack.

These were not desecrators, come to defile the murals Silver Torc had never been able to bring himself to care about as they crumbled. They had optics only for each other, the tomb of no interest to them except as a place where they could be alone together. For the first time he could remember, Silver Torc thought that he would spare their lives if he could. But they had wandered too far into the tomb for easy retreat, and he had lapsed once again into utter silence. 

Their fate was sealed. Silver Torc stepped forward to loom over them, weapon in hand, and one screamed. 

Silver Torc hissed and swung his sword at them. Missed. The lamp fell and shattered. Fuel and fire spread as one to Silver Torc’s feet. His frame caught and he recoiled again, this time with a terrible shriek of pain. Smoke billowed from his mouth and leaked from around his optics as he burned.

The lovers turned to flee, only to run into Arrow Shield. Without a word he plunged the bearded blade of his broken axe into the first one, sending sparks flying from his split helm. It was gruesome but, in the one mercy the guardians could grant two young fools who never should have come here in the first place, it was quick.

The other mech caught his lover’s frame and fell with it, landing on his knees with a desperate wail. His death was not as quick, but the supernatural strength the curse imbued the guardians with ensured it only took a couple of strikes with Arrow Shield’s axe-handle-turned-club to cave in his head rather than a couple dozen.

“You didn’t deserve this,” he said over their corpses. Jealousy, not guilt, surged briefly in his thoughts, drawing Silver Torc’s attention even through his agony.  _ To die together with the one you love…  _ Arrow Shield would have given anything to die with those he had loved, his brothers in arms.  _ May they all have died without me, spared this unending torment… _

Fire seared through Silver Torc’s already decayed chassis. He collapsed to the ground, huddled in on himself in an attempt to escape the flames. He could not, and there was nothing to use to put out the blaze. He could only wait for the fire to go out on its own.

His armor was charred and smoking, and his dark optics cracked with heat when it was finally over. Arrow Shield came up beside him, gently touching his armor. Bits of it flaked off or crumbled away as he pressed out lingering embers with his fingers. “Just a few more,” he said in a soft voice. The embers burned dark spots on his fingers as he worked. 

Silver Torc watched him, for once not as a commander to his subordinate but as one mech to another. He felt like he hadn’t seen him before, and yet… “You are…” 

“One of the guard. Jazz.” The gentle touches continued. “Can you stand, General?”

“General?” Silver Torc shakily pushed himself to his charred feet. “That is… We are to protect the tomb.” 

“Protect the tomb. How could I possibly forget?” The other Empty sighed and stood as well. “But there’s no threat now. The intruders are dead.”

“Yes.” Silver Torc lurched toward the corridor, blackened paint flaking off in his wake. He could hear and sense the other guardians shuffling through the tomb, returning to their patrols. Arrow Shield — Jazz — was the only one that didn’t. Was something wrong with him? Some sort of processor damage? Probably not; the state of their processors had no effect on the awareness or lack thereof of the guardians. They all were equally mindless, even the one that didn’t even have a head. They just responded to intruders, or to Silver Torc’s directions. 

Except for Jazz, who Silver Torc had seen come up with his own tactics on occasion. Jazz, who laughed in the darkness and could speak in sentences.

It didn’t matter. Protect the tomb.

“Protect the tomb, sure, but what does that mean when there’s no one to protect it from?” Jazz glanced at the bodies, still bleeding fluids onto the floor, then fell in step behind Silver Torc. “They came alone and we took them by surprise. They didn’t know where they were.”

Silver Torc hissed and stumbled. He had been chosen, and he ~~had fought~~ was honored to command the defenders of the master… “They die,” he said, like the words were being pulled from him. Or squeezed from him. “They all die. There must be no intruders to disturb the master.”

“Ri~ight, I got that part but, again,” Jazz gestured around them, “there aren’t any intruders now. What do we do  _ now?” _

Silver Torc paused and looked back at the two lovers, really  _ seeing  _ them the way he had when he’d thought to spare them. Then he looked up at Jazz, an answer on his rusted lips and… The knowledge slid from his mind. His dark, cracked optics returned to the corpses. Just the remains of the intruders. 

“Uughhh.” Jazz dragged his hand down his face. “Pleeeease don’t shut down on me here, there is  _ no one  _ else to talk to!”

Silver Torc looked up. He opened his mouth, hesitated. Hesitated for too long, honestly. Then, “Why?”

“I don’t know. But no one else talks, no one else reacts to things that don’t come in from outside. I don’t know what’s worse: being surrounded by them or being one of them. They aren’t — not alive, none of us are alive, but — aware.” 

“They weren’t chosen. They weren’t special. I was…” Silver Torc hissed again, swaying in sudden pain. “I was… a commander. I… struck… down… the master’s enemies,” he finished, more strongly, more sure. “Eternal service is our reward.” 

Jazz laughed, harsh and edging toward hysterical. “This isn’t a reward, it’s a punishment! One we didn’t do anything to deserve.”

Silver Torc looked at him. “I know you. You were, you are… are…” The thought slipped away, squeezed inexorably out of his mind. Irrelevant. “You serve the master.” 

Jazz shuddered at the words like they were a physical blow. “I serve the master,” he repeated, a defiant  _ No!  _ struggling to be heard over the volume of the command.  _ That’s not all I am! _ “Not all there is and not all I am and it’s not all you,” he pointed at Silver Torc, “are either.”

“No. There is nothing else,” the doorwinged Empty recited by rote, “I serve the master. Protect the tomb.” 

“Protect the tomb, yeah, yeah, yeah, but…” Jazz groaned again. “My frame does that on its own. Walking the halls, over and over and over, but my thoughts…” They wandered too, but not always on the same paths as his feet. 

Silence fell between them. Silver Torc felt his own thoughts wandering in fog, searching for something he thought he’d seen but couldn’t remember… 

“His name was Moondance,” he said dreamily. “He was red, and we’re in a garden and it’s peaceful. We loved… That was… before… before…”  **_Irrelevant!_ ** “Before the master. We  _ serve _ the master.  _ Protect the tomb.” _

Jazz’s errant thoughts collapsed beneath the command focused directly on him. “We serve the master. Protect the tomb.”

Arrow Shield returned to the corpses and pulled the head of his axe free from the intruder’s head. Weapons were necessary to protect the tomb. Silver Torc tightened his grip on his sword and resumed his patrol, soot trailing in his wake.

There shouldn’t have been footsteps behind him, but for some reason Arrow Shield fell in step behind him. “There’s no one here,” Arrow— Jazz said. “No one but us in the maze.”

Silver Torc said nothing. Their conversation was over.

There was no time in the darkness of the tomb. It could have been an hour, a day or a decade before they circled back to the central chamber, with the massive statue and the sarcophagus. Cracked and rusted, the statue was missing several fingers. When had the rubble started to accumulate here? Silver Torc shook the thought away. Nothing was immune to the decay of time.

Nothing… except the book. It lay on the floor, half open and pages bent. It must have been there since the ghost had thrown it from its pedestal; it was still inside the tomb, and that was all that had mattered. Now, though, Jazz bent down and picked it up.

“Hey.” He stood still, staring at the symbols on the page it had fallen open to. Silver Torc ignored him. There was no mistaking the magic in the book, that it had something to do with how they were bound here, but the symbols actively resisted being read. It was of no use to them.

He finished his circuit of the room and turned to leave.“Hey!” Jazz stumbled as he rushed to catch him, bringing the book with him. “You’ve seen this before, right? Can you read it?”

“Lieutenant Jazz?” Silver Torc answered without thinking, coming out of the comforting retreat of blind obedience.

_ Lieutenant?  _ The word echoed in Jazz’s thoughts and resonated down the spellwork binding them. He hadn’t mentioned his rank before. He hadn’t remembered what it even was. “You recognize me?”

“Lieutenant Jazz, Special Operations division of…” Silver Torc stopped. He shook his head hard enough that he stumbled against the wall, leaving a black, sooty, smear.  _ Irrelevant. _ “We serve the master. Protect the tomb.”

“Protect the tomb,” Jazz sighed, regarding Silver Torc with sad understanding: “You’re not just losing your train of thought, it’s being actively derailed. Something’s…” 

The magic interposed itself, squeezing out his thoughts until there was no room left for them. It didn’t want him remembering anything beyond those glimpses of his service to the master he’d seen when the necromancers had raised him. Couldn’t remember, couldn’t speak.

Silver Torc forgot all about their aborted conversation and limped back to patrol. 

Behind him, Jazz looked down at the book in his hands. “You stomped on him hard,” he said to it, the words echoing softly in the chamber. 

Violent thoughts toward the book almost made Silver Torc turn to cut down the errant guardian-turned-threat, but Jazz didn’t do anything except continue holding the book and lean against the wall.

Silver Torc didn’t nudge him along to his patrols and allowed him to wait. He could protect the tomb from there, and they could speak again the next time he came by on patrol… 

A millennium passed. Time took its toll not only on the tomb but the terrain around it. Earthquakes rocked the region, several of them strong enough to buckle the ground and warp the maze. What used to be paths leading to the central chamber were reduced to dead ends of collapsed rubble, and others that once ended in death gained new openings to adjacent hallways. The guardians that weren’t buried by the cave-ins had to relearn their way around the tomb, a task not all of them were up to. Some could only wander what was left of their original routes, leaving gaps in the patrols, while others remained fixed where they had found themselves when the aftershocks faded, utterly lost. 

Cracks spread like spiderwebs across the murals on the walls. Many of the precious inlays now lay on the floor, kicked into corners or buried in debris. Silver Torc wandered among them, sometimes pausing in front of those still reasonably intact, trying to pull memory from the stories. He knew he had lived these events, standing in the ranks of generals and mages behind Lord Megatronus in every image. He had been granted the gift of eternal service here in the tomb… but he did not see himself in the pictures, and knew he had not been in the ones now decayed beyond recognition.

His gaze slid past images of Megatronus’ sibling-Primes, unable to register in his scattered thoughts. Their armies were only a vague depiction of the doomed masses that feared or fought against their inevitable transformations into the undead.

Absently he scratched at a place on his chest, the last flakes of red paint long since fallen into the dust and debris of the tomb.

.

.

.

##  The Desecration

.

.

.

A conquering army marched across the ground above the tomb, their steady tread a break in the monotony of the ages. Dust shook down from the ceiling, an intermittent rain on the heads of the remaining Empties. It was only a matter of time before a section collapsed completely, burying two of the soldiers and startling the rest. Weapons bristling, the disrupted battalion stopped to investigate. 

Nearly caught in the collapse himself, Silver Torc stumbled slightly before bracing a hand against the wall… or what was left of it. This was the biggest incursion they had yet faced, but for better or worse, he was the guardian commander and he called the others to the site of the breech. Distantly he knew the crack would eventually cause more problems than the soldiers were right this second, allowing more vandals and vermin into the already-broken maze, but it wasn’t a thought that caught well in his spell-ravaged mind. He’d forget, and there were more immediate problems anyway.

The compulsion to attack took hold and he drew his sword in blackened fingers, but he forced himself to stop and stay in the shadows of the uncollapsed tunnel until the others arrived. He watched the armed mechs. They were familiar in a way, rank upon disrupted rank of mechs… but none of their symbols or markings stirred memories. Silver Torc hesitated. The guardians were many, but they were not an army. This enemy outnumbered them, and other than varying degrees of fatigue from their march, they were in good form. 

They were capable of doing a lot of damage if they weren’t stopped quickly.

“Psst.” 

Silver Torc acknowledged Arrow Shield with a gentle, mental nudge along the spellwork that gave him command over the others. 

“That’s a lot of intruders,” the other Empty whispered. The noise the soldiers were making easily covered the sound. “What do we do?”

“Kill them,” Silver Torc answered automatically, their service allowing for nothing else, but he held the guardians back from lunging into the fray. It was an effort, but he did so. The Empties barely knew their own patrol routes now that the tomb had been broken so much by time, but he could still visualize what was left. Silently he nudged several Empties to start bringing down the maze walls around the breech, to seal the intruders off and funnel them to… He growled, physically clawing at the air in an attempt to get his memory to work. “Go collect the bows from… from…” He was  _ certain _ a group of tomb robbers had broken in with bows at some point, but he was having difficulty remembering… anything.

Arrow Shield frowned, then nodded. “Right. There’s bows in the yellow dust room.” He slipped away, a moving presence still in Silver Torc’s awareness once he was out of sight. It was a good thing he’d been able to remember where the bows were. Silver Torc tried to imagine yellow, or remember the dust. Some of the murals had yellow on them… right?

More importantly, he was having trouble remembering  _ the plan. _ It was the only chance the guardians had of stopping an army —  _ protect the tomb _ — but it required so many things that went against their natures. Waiting first among them.

To counter it and keep himself focused, Silver Torc concentrated on directing the Empties through the broken maze. Arrow Shield —  _ Jazz _ — radiated triumph when he found the bows and arrows. The fletching of the latter was tattered and crumbled at a touch and the points had rusted away, but the steel nylon bowstrings would hold and fire a few times. With a mental nudge, Jazz and the others converged on the crevasse that had been opened up by the earthquake. 

Silver Torc turned to join them. Something on the floor caught his gaze and he stopped, suddenly losing the thread of the present moment. He must have walked his corridor a literal million times and seen the… he wasn’t sure what to call it… among the bones of previous intruders, but this time he  _ knew _ it. 

He picked it up and his fingers curled around it as familiarly as his sword. He fumbled with holding both at once though, and with a practiced motion sheathed the sword at his hip. The scabbard was long gone, but it stayed where he put it when he thrust it through a seam in his blackened plating. 

Both armies had fought predominantly with simple smithed weapons, swords and axes and shields. The master had wielded the terrible Requiem Blaster. The other Primes had their own weapons. And some, the generals like him, had lesser but still powerful — still  _ magical _ — weapons, forged by Solus Prime.

As if in a dream, he turned back to the intruders, clutching the rusted acid pellet rifle. They had found the other tunnels from their breech ended in only rockfalls and were starting to come down this one, exploring curiously, and collecting precious stones fallen from the inlays as they went.

_ Kill them. _

He fired the rifle at the lead mech.  _ Click. _

Nothing.

The lack of anything happening and the compulsion together were almost enough to send him alone into the fray, and at the edge of his consciousness he felt the horde stir from their patient vigil at the crevasse. The reminder was barely enough for Silver Torc to haul his blackened frame down the corridor and further in the darkness. He needed a bow. 

He had one in his hands as soon as he crossed the crevasse and met up with Jazz. “It won’t shoot for long, but whatever you’ve got there isn’t going to shoot at all. I got eight of them — who should I pass them out to?”

In answer, and at Silver Torc’s command, half a dozen of the Empties stepped out of their respective halls and into the space that had been opened by the crevasse. The headless Empty held out his hand expectantly. More were on their way, but the maze hadn’t been easy to navigate before it had been shattered, and it was getting harder for Silver Torc to concentrate and direct them around all the obstacles and onto the right paths. Would it be enough?

It would have to be. Enough of the intruders had funneled themselves into position. It was time.

With one coordinated movement, the first volley of arrows was in the air. Not all of them flew true; one bowstring snapped on the first draw, fouling the shot, and not all of the Empties were the best aim — Headless, ironically, was one of the better ones — but even those that didn’t hit their marks were successful in announcing their presence.

The living mechs called out in alarm, spurring those behind them into greater speed as they themselves rushed forward to face their foes… and fell to their dooms in the tomb’s one remaining trap: the crevasse. 

Shouts turned to screams, and over the screams Silver Torc briefly heard Jazz’s laugh, there and gone as the battle demanded his attention. They  _ would  _ protect the tomb! 

One of those falling managed to fling himself across instead, and he clung to the side of the crevasse. He screamed again, scrambling away; the Empty reached for him as if in a dream. Instead of crushing the mech, he plucked the weapon from where it was slung across his back. It was similar in shape to the acid rifle Silver Torc had recognized earlier. He fiddled with it, then aimed and fired. A loud bang echoed through the chamber, rattling the dust. Instead of the half-expected acid pellet, a lead ball shot out the end with a flash of fire and the mech fell dead into the crevasse. 

Without hesitation, Silver Torc fired on those still across the crevasse, who had recognized the danger and had stopped, unslinging their own rifles. Another fell dead, and his weapon clattered to the ground inches from his twitching hands. They managed a volley of lead pellets, which struck the Empties and blew off chunks of armor… but were otherwise ineffective. 

Fortunate, since only Silver Torc and Jazz had the mental faculties to get behind cover or duck.

It wasn’t an easy battle, even with the terrain advantage. The bows and arrows didn’t hold up, as Silver Torc had known they wouldn’t, which left the guardians with only their ancient melee weapons (many of which were also broken) and the rubble to fight with. The rifle he had picked up was quickly out of pellets and he couldn’t get another one. He contemplated sending one of the guardians across to throw some of them back, but it would certainly result in the Empty being fully dismembered, and—

The gunfire, the smoke and the screams, the hisses and growls of the undead and the flash of a doorwinged mech broke something open in Silver Torc’s memory. Desperate to defend his home from the invaders, he picked up a rock and threw it at shadows he could barely see. It was the first night, the night ~~the Betrayer~~ Lord Megatronus had sealed his pact and raised his first hordes and sent them screaming into the cities to kill… 

A horrible undead wail rose around him, filling the cavern as the horde charged again.  _ Protect the tomb. The intruders must die. _ The all-encompassing, singular purpose sent the guardians surging toward the soldiers, and Silver Torc could not call them back from so powerful a directive. Instead the memory was crushed out of him and he joined them.  _ Protect the tomb! _

There was only one, unstable crossing, but several impatient Empties did their best to leap across the chasm. Two didn’t make it, and Silver Torc felt their breaking. Legs shattered, they crawled over the dead mechs who had already fallen in to climb the walls with only their arms. Most, including Silver Torc, made it across. Catching the side of the crevasse like the mech he’d killed, Silver Torc ignored the wounds inflicted by those firing down at him to haul himself onto more even ground. 

He’d dropped his musket and his acid pellet rifle both, and so he drew his sword from its makeshift sheath to hack at the nearest, now terrified, intruders. Unintentional as it was, the charge had dealt a heavy blow to their enemy’s morale. Some turned and fled rather than stand and fight, with more seeming to leave with every fresh death.

One staggered by with a freshly legless Empty clinging to his back, flailing desperately to dislodge it. He fell when his own legs were cut out from under him by a blow from Jazz’s club, screaming as Legless tore into him with the only weapons it had left: fingers and teeth.

They pursued the intruders relentlessly all the way back to the breach, where they stopped, unable to leave the tomb despite their bloodlust. 

Silver Torc managed to shake off the haze, and with him the horde went still. 

He watched the army silently, almost sightlessly, as the frightened survivors surged out into the battalion, trying to spur them to action. Others peeked in, and one of the legless leaped at them, clawing viciously. Mechs shot their muskets in to no effect except to remind Silver Torc of the weapons’ existence. At his direction, a mindless Empties looted one from a body and brought it to him, and he fired on the next one to come by to shoot into the hole.

They stopped trying to get in or assuage their curiosity after that.

Silver Torc heard arguments in a language he didn’t know echo down from the surface. 

“They’re scared,” Jazz observed, coming up beside him. He had new holes in his plating and fresh scores down through the dust and rust covering him, bright enough to gleam in the minimal light from the night sky. “Scared enough that chain of command’s struggling to pull ‘em back together, it sounds like.”

“Yes,” Silver Torc replied, unable to abandon his vigil to patrol what was left of the maze. 

“I really hope they don’t try to come back in. There’s so many of them I don’t think we can—” Jazz stopped abruptly. “They’re moving, but they’re not mobilizing. It sounds more like… can you hear that?”

Silver Torc tilted his head, but heard nothing more than a cessation of the arguments. 

Jazz climbed —  _ Do not leave the tomb! — _ up closer to the opening and stopped just shy of it, watching and listening. “What are you doing… I know what you’re doing, don’t I? I know I know, I just…”

“What is it, Saboteur?” Silver Torc snapped imperiously, the need to know cutting through the magic enough to let him recall that Jazz knew the right things to get him an answer.

The byname lit up in Jazz’s head too, sparking brightly enough for Silver Torc to see how it ignited other associated memories: sneaking around, hiding in shadows, slipping into strategic points with a knife and— “Explosives,” Jazz said when he made the connection. “They’re moving powder, positioning it above us and laying fuses so they can bring the maze down on us.”

_Kill them!_ _Protect the tomb!_

But they couldn’t  _ leave _ the tomb, even to protect it.

“How much of the maze will it destroy?” The soldiers couldn’t know of the existence of any more of the maze than the bits they’d seen. Surely they wouldn’t be setting enough charges to bring everything down.

“From what I can hear… it’ll obliterate what’s left of the east side here, based on where they’re placing things right now. If the blast’s strong enough to collapse the Arch,” not one intended in the maze’s construction, but rather one that had fallen together by chance in the last great earthquake, “I think the rest of the southern tunnels will come down too.”

And the guardians couldn’t stop them. Silver Torc clenched his fist around the hilt of his sword in frustration. Protect the tomb. Don’t leave the tomb. Protect the tomb, kill the intruders, don’t leave the tomb, there’s no intruders… 

_ Serve the master! _

Silver Torc hissed as he forced himself to write off the maze as lost. “Retreat to the central chamber. Protect the master.” He reached out to enforce the order in the horde. 

“Protect the master, yes, yes, I’m going, I’m going,” Jazz said in response, quickly outpacing one of the legless clawing its way toward the center. “Last place I want to be when they light it up is right below them.”

Silver Torc didn’t answer, fighting to keep his resolve and nudge every remaining empty in that direction while his own mandate echoed in his head, screaming at him that he should be standing his ground, protecting the tomb, and killing the threat. He stumbled, knocking more stones from an inlay as his sword dragged through the accumulated ages’ worth of dust and dead frames. 

He staggered his way into Jazz, who’d inexplicably stopped again. “Are you okay?”

_ Protect the tomb! Kill the intruders! _ Silver Torc just hissed, unable to respond, and pushed Jazz towards the central chamber.  _ “Go!”  _ The combined physical and mental push sent him lurching forward immediately, his strangely bright thoughts momentarily suppressed. But Silver Torc was in no state to continue focusing his direct attention solely on Jazz, and while he did keep moving he stayed close, refusing to leave him behind. 

The hallway grew more crowded the closer they got to the central chamber. The army above far outnumbered them, but there were still more guardians than could reasonably fit inside together with the statue and the sarcophagus. They climbed over and on top of each other to obey Silver Torc’s order, struts and armor all scraping together in a writhing hiss. Silver Torc stilled them all with a ragged thought and leaned against the wall. Protect the tomb, kill the intruders. Protect the tomb, kill the intruders… it was taking everything he had to keep the guardians gathered here. They hadn’t been designed to  _ abandon _ any part of the tomb, but it was the only way they could continue to protect  _ any _ of the tomb, or the master’s corpse, or the Requiem Blaster… 

“Come on, come on, come on…” Jazz shifted from foot to foot, struggling with the same conflicting demands. “We’re scary, you want to bury us as fast as you can the second you think you have enough charges set. There’s no need for overkill, we’re already dead.”

Silver Torc spared one last bit of attention, stilling him with the rest of the horde. Then, spread too thin to control his own frame, he lurched involuntarily toward the door himself. 

Jazz caught his arm. “No! You have to stay with us!”

Silver Torc blinked at him.  _ Why? _ he wanted to ask, but it was too much effort to form the word. Protect the tomb. This  _ is _ the tomb! Prote—

_ kkrr _ **_rrrRR-AKOWWW!_ **

The sound was so loud it deafened even thought, rolling through the maze together with the shockwave created by the explosives. The tomb shuddered, some parts of it simply  _ gone  _ while others crumbled and collapsed at a speed Silver Torc could feel. __

_ Protect the tomb. Protect the tomb. Protect the tomb. Protectthetomb.  _

And then the dust began to settle and Silver Torc collapsed under the release of it. The maze was gone. Undoubtedly scattered bits of it were still intact, but as far as the magic was concerned, their new boundary — the central chamber, a few halls around it, and the hidden relic chamber — was the tomb. And there was no threat to that boundary. He released the Empties to move, spread out, to find their new patrol routes and stand new vigils as he slid down the wall, exhausted as he hadn’t believed an undead could be.

Jazz slid down beside him, head tipped back as he stared up at the ceiling. 

They sat there, unmoving, watching the air slowly clear. Silver Torc could feel the new layer of dust covering them thicken.

“I used to set explosions like that,” Jazz said some time later.

Silver Torc just looked at him, his mind too fried to remember. “Protect the master,” he said softly, but was too exhausted to focus it into a command.

“Protect the master,” Jazz still echoed, but distantly. “It’s weird. I can remember going out to sabotage supply lines, communications, all sorts of things. I can remember it and it’s not fading this time.”

Silver Torc, whose mind and memories were both currently an almost blank slate, couldn’t even be jealous. 

“I wonder how long that will last. With that bit of excitement over we’ll be back to literal mind-numbing boredom soon enough.” Jazz resumed talking, unperturbed by Silver Torc’s lack of response. “I’m glad you made it. This place would be intolerable if I was trapped here all alone.”

Alone? ~~They were all alone~~ None of them were alone. If Silver Torc reached out he could feel them, count them. One, two, three…

“Why?”

New rubble crunched as Jazz shifted beside him, pieces of the mural above them that had fallen around them where they sat. “Because… if it was just me there’d be no reason to be me. As little of myself as I have, I don’t want to lose it. Maybe it would be easier to be like them, but the thought of it… scares me.”

Silver Torc stared at him, trying to measure or quantify or even understand what, if anything, could set them apart from the others. “We serve the master.”

Jazz chuckled. “I’ll just pretend that means ‘yes, I understand what you mean and what you’re going through’, how about that? Maybe it even does, if you could get out from under that magical boot.” He shook his head. “Don’t worry, I know you’re too tired to really talk. You don’t have to say anything, just listen. Just be there. So I’m not just talking to myself.”

A memory stirred in the darkness like a cobweb and Silver Torc blinked. They had done this before, hadn’t they? Already the maze, no longer part of the tomb, was hard to remember, to conceive of, to conceptualize, but he had spent centuries patrolling it almost silently while Jazz talked about memories and life and curses and suffering. And Silver Torc had just… been there, so that Jazz wasn’t talking to himself. There was no resentment or boredom attached to the faint memories, just brief periods of companionship that stood out against ages spent lost in the compulsions to obey and eons of staring at the fading murals, trying to comprehend them and the increasing disconnect between the flashes of memory they sparked and what he knew to be true. He had stood at the master’s shoulder, commanding the armies as he crushed his enemies… but he also hadn’t.

“Anyway, I’m glad you made it. I wasn’t sure if you’d follow your own order to retreat or let that whole protect the tomb thing get you buried.”

“I almost couldn’t,” Silver Torc admitted, though the memory was becoming hazy. He had defied… something? Someone? to order retreat and the effort of it had almost crushed his tired will to resist.

Jazz nodded. “It was stomping you again. Probably still doing it, with me rambling on about things it doesn’t like. But I’m used to it. Zone out whenever you have to, I’ll keep picking at who the Saboteur was, who  _ I  _ was, until the light in my head goes out. One memory sparking another until they burn out and drift away in smoke…”

Silver Torc did “zone” out. His awareness faded, then focused, then faded again, all while Jazz talked, connecting his memories together. He wasn’t making a lot of sense — what was this maze he talked about? The one full of traps he was only now realizing he’d known how to reset because of who he’d been before? — but Jazz didn’t need him to understand. 

Every now and then he asked a question. They were few and far between but Silver Torc would try to answer, either with a grunt or a sigh or a repetition of their duty as seemed appropriate. 

After a while — a week? a month? a year? — it occured to Silver Torc that they should really patrol the tomb, but the tomb was so small and there were so many guardians that patrols were hardly necessary. He could feel them all, filling the boundaries like an undisturbed liquid… The feeling calmed the urge to get up every time it returned and Silver Torc would end up just sitting there with Jazz, listening while he talked or waiting in comfortable silence that stretched for days or weeks or…

A decade passed in silence. Maybe two, or three, or more… And Silver Torc…. “I picked something up in the…” he trailed off, unable to remember why he’d spoken. An hour went by, and Silver Torc only knew it because Jazz had started quivering, vibrating with the energy of actively listening. “A weapon. It was broken beyond use. An acid pellet rifle. It was mine. It was made for me. I should have been buried with it.” 

“A rifle? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you with one. Not that that means much with how patchy my memory still is,” Jazz sighed. “It was yours though? Really?”

“Yes,” Silver Torc answered a day later. “It was made for me. I couldn’t see it, until I knew that it had been made for me. She made something unique for each of us, for the ones who might be caught in the crossfire between the warring Primes.” 

“She…” Jazz trailed off, thinking. “Who was she? And the warring Primes?”

A century passed. “Solus Prime,” the doorwinged Empty whispered softly. “The Smith who could make anything and who forged The B— Lord Megatronus’ Requiem Blaster, and then who stood with her siblings against H-hi— Protect the tomb.” Silver Torc lurched to his feet, one doorwing dragging where an injury or rust had severed the connections, and plodded off to patrol. 

Serve the master. Protect the tomb…

…had Jazz said it too? He always said it; it was call and response, hello and goodbye every time their duty reasserted itself, but Silver Torc couldn’t remember if he’d heard him this time. 

What he did know was that Jazz would be there, standing vigil while he patrolled

Silver Torc continued his circuit, passing by the entrance to the chamber over and over. Jazz was always there, waiting and watching and wondering. 

Protect the tomb… Had the words resonated down into Jazz’s frame as they should? They must have. He could  _ remember  _ the words. He could hear them. And Silver Torc could still sense Jazz in the network of thoughts they all shared. He was confused though, where all the others were content in simple, mindless devotion. What was going on? 

There were still cracks in the darkness of Jazz’s mind. He wasn’t forgetting what he had remembered from before, and he was starting to remember more. He’d told Silver Torc that much during their long, intermittent conversation. Had—

No. Memory  _ could not _ be what broke them free of their service. It could not. For if it were… Jazz was  _ not _ an intruder. He could not be. He was one of them.

There. Silver Torc passed by the spot Jazz had been and he wasn’t there. He was up and walking around on patrol.

It was a little odd when that patrol turned to an examination of one of the piles of rubble blocking off a hall, which he said had once led out into a maze. He stopped to watch the others on their patrols, measuring how close they were walking to the walls and then… stepped closer to the rubble. 

_ Protect the tomb!  _ Silver Torc commanded him to stop, calling him to return to the boundary and… nothing. No reaction, no response. He had no power over Jazz. That was—! …fine. It was fine. A single step closer to the rubble didn’t mean anything. He wasn’t leaving. He wasn’t outside the tomb. The maze ~~had been~~ was part of the tomb. 

After that, Silver Torc ignored him. He ignored much. Failed to see much. Lost much in the darkness and stillness and haze of memories… Everything except intruders could be ignored, and there was no intruder here. Jazz was one of them. If he concentrated he could feel Jazz’s curiosity-bright mind still there. One of them. One of them. One of them. 

Serve the master. Protect the tomb.

There was nothing here to protect it from. Just them. Just all of them. 

For years as Silver Torc observed but didn’t see, Jazz paced the boundary of the tomb.  _ Paced, _ not patrolled. He checked out all of the collapsed tunnels. He climbed the rubble of all of them, while the others stayed where they should. Jazz was different from them, but one of them. He wasn’t an intruder. 

Silver Torc absolutely ignored it when Jazz stopped pacing and chose a tunnel and started actively  _ moving  _ the rubble.  _ Protect the tomb. _ But no, there was no threat. Rubble and things moved all the time. Sometimes the Empties even moved it. There was nothing strange here. Silver Torc did not move to stop him, did not order the others to engage him. 

For a century, slowly, carefully, one bit at a time, Jazz moved the rubble. During that time, Silver Torc repeatedly mobilized the Empties under his command, sending them swarming like cyber ants to kill the vermin that snuck in, but Jazz never joined them, was never swayed from his task. He was no longer under his command… no, his hold on Jazz had always been tenuous unless he concentrated specifically on him. Silver Torc did not concentrate on him. He ignored him. He didn’t see him.

Finally, enough of a path had been cleared to stick a hand out of the bounds of the tomb. Inch by inch Jazz extended his arm, reaching out to, then through, the opening. Jazz’s excitement at his success echoed through their minds. He could get _out!_

The tomb’s boundary was breeched! Silver Torc stirred to quell the threat. He had to protect the tomb from—

An insect had crept into the tomb through the opening Jazz was standing in front of. Had there been an opening there before? He couldn’t remember. Insects didn’t always register as intruders, but the presence of something breaching the tomb had called him over here. His foot came down on it, squishing it decisively into goo and pieces of metallic shell. There. The intruder had been vanquished. 

Silver Torc looked down at Jazz and ~~his new~~ the hole. Alarm sparked in Jazz’s thoughts, but even as he moved in front of it to hide the opening ~~he’d made~~ , Silver Torc turned away. Things changed in the tomb all the time. He couldn’t remember how, exactly, but there was knowledge of now-lost newness. There was nothing strange about a hole.

He ignored, didn’t see, as Jazz looked at the hole again. An entrance, if a small one right now. But entrances didn’t matter. Not unless an intruder came through it. Jazz was one of them. An Empty in service to the master.

Protect the tomb. Kill intruders. Serve the master.

Jazz was one of them.

Silver Torc ignored the rapid thoughts, memories, as Jazz recalled when he’d been nearly as mindless as the mindless ~~as mindless as the spell tried to force Silver Torc to be~~ and knew that they wouldn’t, perhaps couldn’t, see the changes ~~he was making~~. 

He kept digging.

It was easier and harder to ignore that. There was a constant low surrus from the spell of  _ threat, threat, threat _ but it was just Jazz. Jazz was an Empty like them. Jazz wasn’t an intruder. 

Then, at last, one day, Jazz was on the other side. Still underground, still in a tunnel, still in the maze, even, but no longer inside the tomb. 

Silver Torc concentrated on the thoughts. As long as he could hear Jazz’s bright-fast thoughts, then he was one of them. Silver Torc didn’t dare send out an order for him to return to the tomb, because if he did and Jazz ignored it… 

Jazz was triumphant, relieved, and Silver Torc ignored that, focusing only on his presence. One of them. One of them. 

Silver Torc forced himself to patrol for intruders. There were no intruders. None. There was  _ nothing unusual _ or out of place here in the tomb. Just silence. As it should be.

He despaired. Jazz had been… a comfort at times. Silver Torc despaired at his leaving. He would miss him, until he forgot him. He knew he didn’t talk much, not as much as Jazz talked to him, but having no one and nothing… Doomed to eternity alone. The very thought was ~~horrifying~~ wearying. And yet, Silver Torc could not be angry at Jazz for going. He looked down at his rusted and decayed hands, just one part of a rusted and decayed frame. He hoped that Jazz’s wait for the master’s return was better for him out there than it was for them all in here. 

Clutching his sword, Silver Torc allowed himself to join the legless and the headless and the others and drift off into a mindless wandering. There was no reason to pay attention to anything anymore. Just patrol, wander, and kill. Perhaps if he spent enough time voluntarily lost in mindless obedience, the loneliness wouldn’t hurt. 

He noticed when the entrance was breached again. The horde stirred. But Silver Torc recognized the thoughts, and the sense of rightness, of something missing slotting back into place, and he kept them from attacking. Jazz wasn’t an intruder. He was one of them. 

“I’m not coming back for you,” Jazz’s growl towards the sarcophagus echoed through the silence as he climbed back into the tomb. Of course he wasn’t. The spell demanded service, but it had never coerced love of the master from him the way it demanded it of Silver Torc. It didn’t matter. His brief sojourn outside didn’t recategorize him as an intruder. Silver Torc had been ready to let him go and retreat to his own mindlessness without him, but he was sure it would destroy him to kill him. Jazz was  _ one of them. _

Protect the tomb. Serve the master.

Jazz rejoined him crouched over the blasted book, gazing sightlessly at an open page. His hand was partway through turning the page, frozen where it had been when he’d lost track of what he was doing.

“Hey.” Jazz knelt down in front of him and took his frozen hand. “You up for a chat?”

Silver Torc blinked, slowly coming up from his thoughts. Lack of thoughts. “Jazz?”

“That’s me. I know questions aren’t really your thing, but there’s something I need to know.”

Questions… Silver Torc didn’t pull away or command them both back into service. His fingers even twitched minutely in Jazz’s grip, assuring him that he hadn’t zoned out yet.

“You and I… You weren’t just a general before, you were my general. Not my direct superior, I mean, but… I fought for you before. Didn’t I?”

“Yes,” Silver Torc answered, then flinched, shaking his head in an attempt to clear it. Jazz’s questions were hard to think about, hard to focus through the interference of… “You… I… “

“I admired you. I trusted you.” The details of why were lost in a haze of forgotten memories, but the feeling was there. “It can’t be because you’re my commander now because I don’t need to— and you knew things about me from before, before I ever remembered them. You  _ knew  _ me, not only as a soldier but as a mech.”

“I tried… Jazz.” Silver Torc shook his head again. “I tried to know you all. What is…?” 

“You were a good general. Worthy of the rank. Worthy of loyalty, then and now.” Jazz paused. Time did and didn’t pass. “All we have is each other.”

Silver Torc squeezed his hand lightly. He wanted to hold on…! But then, as always, he lost his battle against the binding spells, forgetting he had even fought them. “Protect the tomb.”

“Yeah. And that.” Jazz chuffed a soft laugh. “Which is why I’m staying.” 

What was left of Silver Torc’s optics, dark and now clouded with millennia of scratches and grit, narrowed. “Don’t,” he hissed, hands clenching painfully into Jazz. “Don’t imply to me that it’s a choice. Ever.  _ We _ serve the master.”

“Serve the master,” Jazz echoed as he should. If he wasn’t a guardian there was only one other thing he could be, and the very thought was…  _ No.  _ Silver Torc would not contemplate it, did not want to act on it. He would do what he had to in order to protect the one point of solace either of them had in this hell. Jazz was one of them.

“Protect the tomb.”

“Protect the tomb.”

Silver Torc’s grip loosened. The last of his resistance drained out of him and he wandered away to aimlessly patrol what was left of the tomb. Jazz stayed behind, picking up the book in his place. Silver Torc could hear his fingers tracing over the unreadable symbols, following their shapes over and over the same way he followed shapes on the murals and random bits of metal. His thoughts were ~~dangerously~~ bright in the spellwork that bound them together, but he was still there, still  _ one of them. _

An age passed. Gold and silver dulled. Iron rusted. Colors faded to sepulchral grey, receding out of even memory. Above the remaining Empties clustered in the central chamber, the great statue was broken in multiple places, making the figure almost unrecognizable. The carving of Unicron had worn away to only the barest suggestion of a figure. Paint and pigments and metallic leaf all faded, cracked and crumbled. The offerings that had remained relatively well preserved for so long in piles on the floor were finally scattered and lost, their shining gold and gleaming gems all now the color of tarnish and dust. 

Even the silver torc and sword that Silver Torc had carried for so very long blackened with age, like his burned frame. 

Only the sarcophagus, resting on its cracked dias and covered in thick layers of dust, was still intact. It too had worn away in places, but the thick stone remained solid enough to serve its purpose. The master’s rest was undisturbed, but after losing the Requiem Blaster to the final collapse of the maze, it was a cold comfort to the guardians.

Untouched by time was the book, save for dust and the occasional bent and torn pages from its mishandling over the ages. 

Silver Torc was still bound to service, eternal service here in the tomb. This was no gift for loyal service in life. He had been ~~the master’s~~ ~~the Betrayer’s~~ the master’s enemy, fighting the undead with all his spark and ultimately giving his life in the battle against them before being cursed to become one.

“…like ones from other eras, this should be the central…”

“…didn’t sign on this junket to haul dirt!”

“… _ paying _ you for!”

The horde stirred. There were no intruders in the tomb — yet — but mechs who came close enough to hear were something to be wary of. Especially since the thick stone and piles of rubble should have blocked any voices from the outside.

Jazz sifted through the dust at their feet for his weapon. There was nothing solid left to grab onto. “What’s going on?”

“Intruders,” Silver Torc said, clenching his own battered weapon in his almost skeletal hand. Plating and wiring had all decayed away. He stood unflinchingly in one of the cold, slimy puddles left behind after the last flood. “They’re digging in through the eastern hall. I’m tired, Jazz…” 

“I know.” A hand missing three of its fingers rested on his shoulder. “Me too.” 

Their mandate didn’t care how tired they were. The Empties readied at the eastern wall to attack.

The first rays of sunlight in an age speared through the gloom as the intruders opened up the ceiling. Several bricks, the mortar and welding all rusted away, fell to the floor.

“Ironhide! Be careful! We don’t want to damage it!”

_ “You _ be careful,” the digger snarled back. “It’s all basically rubble anyway!”

They were too busy with each other to notice the “rubble” standing in the shadows, waiting for them to make the fatal mistake of crossing the threshold.

“It’s  _ scientifically valuable _ rubble,” the more distant voice snapped back. “There are almost no surviving structures from this period.”

“Ain’t like this one survived either.” 

“Alright stop. That’s a big enough entrance. We need to keep as much of the structure intact as possible!”

The magic agreed with them —  _ Protect the tomb! —  _ but Silver Torc was under no illusions about their chances of success on that score. The battle with the last intruders — or had it been the ones before that? Or the ones before that? — had caused the last remaining tunnel and the entrance to the central chamber to collapse, and while only Jazz could remember what had once lain beyond it, the pile of rubble and the cracked slabs of the former door were evidence of the tomb’s worrying lack of structural integrity.

A ladder made of flexible steel cable unrolled down from the hole they had opened up in the ceiling and one of them — the one who had been yelling out orders to the others — climbed down. 

He got as far as pulling out a hand light to hold up before being cut down with a scream. The light fell and rolled, revealing the waiting Empties and casting eerie shadows across the dead tomb.

“Holy  _ hell!” _ the one called Ironhide yelled, and the end of a massive arm-mounted cannon lit up right before three of the Mindless disappeared in a flash. Well, most of them. There were three pairs of feet now running around independently in the stone hall.

Silver Torc hissed. “Pull him in!” he commanded. “Kill him!” The horde responded, climbing the crumbling walls to claw and scratch at the hole in the ceiling to drag the mechs into the tomb where they could attack them.

“Get back, get back!” Ironhide seemed to be talking to everyone at once, pushing his fellow intruders behind him while firing again on the guardians. The frenzy of his activity meant he only hit one with the blast this time, but he caved in another’s head with a vicious kick. It fell back into the tomb, feeling blindly for its face.

“No, no! Please, let go! Someone save me I don’t want to die! Ironhide, Glyph, somebody please try!”

An orange minibot failed to get out of range in time. He screamed and thrashed as the horde solidified their hold on him, some stabbing the discarded struts of the dismembered guardians and previous victims through his plating and using them to drag him over the edge. They all fell to the ground together with a crash, where the rest of the horde descended on him in a bloodthirsty frenzy. Many of them, like Jazz, no longer had any melee weapons, and so they ripped and clawed and stabbed with whatever they could reach. 

Ironhide lunged forward again to shoot his arm-cannon, but several Empties still clinging to the ceiling around the hole leaped at him. One of the legless found purchase clinging to the weapon and hauled himself up, clawing at Ironhide’s face. The intruder scrambled away, fouling the shot, and the legless Empty let him go and fell rather than allow itself to be pulled from the tomb. 

The horde finished ripping the minibot to pieces with one last agonizing shriek. Then the Empties retreated from the light piercing the darkness of the tomb, waiting for their next victim to appear. 

There was a brief moment of silence.

“What the  _ frag  _ was that?!” Ironhide’s voice boomed out. “I was prepared for tomb robbers or bandits, not— whatever  _ those  _ are!”

“I think they were Empties,” another voice whispered timidly. 

“Those are just a myth!” someone else denied immediately. 

“Well that ‘myth’ just tried to kill us,” a third said heatedly. “The satellite radar image showed this was the central chamber. That maze we uncovered was obviously built for someone important. We haven’t found any other surviving tombs from this period.” He paused, then offered in a calmer, more suave tone of voice, “What if this is the tomb of the Fallen Prime? He was the one who supposedly made a pact with Unicron and started raising undead.” 

“That’d be one hell of a coincidence,” Ironhide growled. “Of all the ruins to pick, we just had to get the most cursed one on the planet.”

Jazz laughed. The sound echoed through the chamber, hollow and haunting. They knew nothing of cursed. 

The conversation ceased abruptly. The intruders stood still and silent as Jazz’s laughter faded into giggles, then away to nothing. 

“What do we do?” someone asked softly. 

No one answered right away. “They didn’t come out after us,” someone finally said. “The one that had your gun even let go and fell back in. Whatever they are, they’re contained in the tomb.”

“The tomb you came to excavate. Kinda hard to get in and do all your cataloguing while they’re busy tearin’ you to pieces,” Ironhide pointed out.

“Yeah,” Jazz whispered, this time too low for the intruders to hear. “Not worth it. Just seal this place back up and leave.” 

Silver Torc hummed in agreement. A battle avoided was a battle won, despite the curse’s demand for blood.

“And maybe they’re not contained in the tomb,” the suave one spoke again. “It could be they don’t like the light and they’re just waiting for nightfall to swarm up out of that hole we made!”

“If an Empty bites you, do you turn into an Empty?”

“No! …That’s sparkeaters, right?”

“I thought it was all the undead things!”

“In Tarn they say—”

“It doesn’t matter what they say in Tarn or anywhere else. Those things aren’t even supposed to exist.”

“Well, obviously they do!”

Fear and panic, the familiar combination. Even hardened conscripts and criminals cowered before them, and these mechs sounded soft — apart from Ironhide, who was clearly some kind of personal guard. One mech guarding five-now-three… civilians? Historians? The one who talked about Primes and the Betrayer probably was, at least. In any case, the smart thing for Ironhide to do to protect them would be to get everyone far, far away. 

Would they value the tomb above their own lives? 

“Well we can’t leave them there for someone else to stumble on.” 

“Beachcomber!”

“You can’t destroy the tomb! It’s the only one left!”

“That we know of.”

“That we know of!” 

“Well frag,” Ironhide said. “You’re saying we can’t just blow this thing and leave it done.” 

“Yes!”

“So someone has to go in there and… what? Kill them?” The horde lifted weapons — dented, bent, and makeshift as they were. “Did you hear that?”

There was a tense, expectant silence. “Are you suggesting they can understand us?”

“I think at least one of them can,” the historian said softly. “We all heard the laughter, and I thought I heard someone shouting commands earlier.”

“Well, frag.”

Jazz turned to Silver Torc. “We could talk to them,” he whispered. “Tell them to go away and leave the master alone.”

Silver Torc’s hand clenched, and his rust-exposed teeth gritted. He wanted to… He opened his mouth, started to speak, then snapped it closed. The spell wouldn’t let him negotiate. There was only one fate for intruders. He made a choking sound before spitting out, “Kill them,” like he resented the words.

“Okay. We kill them.” Assuming they could. Silver Torc concentrated on  _ the intruders, _ determinedly ignoring Jazz’s ~~dangerous~~ clear thought that  _ if we wait until nightfall I might be able to sneak among them and snuff them out, but if I do that _ … Jazz sighed and sank heavily back into the dust. Because, if he left he could never come back as anything but an intruder himself, and he would not, could not put that weight on Silver Torc. Not when they were both so weighed down already with enduring, existing. 

The horde waited. Apparently upon realizing that there were maybe Empties down here that weren’t totally mindless, the intruders decided to move away from the hole they’d made to discuss their options. There was no more chatter from the surface. 

Shadows moved across the floor, lengthening with the day. Silver Torc held out his hand, into the lengthening rays of the sun for the first time since he’d died… and felt no warmth on his plating. 

“That gun,” Jazz said, staring up at the sky. “You ever see anything like it?”

“Some of the things that Sssol… she made,” Silver Torc said, stuttering on the name. His one semi functional doorwing flinched down, and he clenched his teeth as the spell lashed at him, but managed not to repeat the spell’s mandates before continuing. “Mmm— the acid pellet rifle could bore through an Empty with a single shot and slay them. But S-ss— the Prime’s weapons were magic as well as machine, and could slay the undead.” One of the severed feet crawled over almost pointedly. It had broken itself down further, disjointing itself to adopt a new and disturbing form of locomotion that would let it scuttle around and stab things with one of its own sharpened struts. Definitely not destroyed, despite how much of it was gone. 

“The last intruders didn’t have anything that could do that though.” Jazz redirected the foot, sending it scuttling over the torso of an Empty whose head had been buried in the rubble. The rest of the Empty had already pulled itself free, leaving them with a second headless, but the disembodied foot excavated the decayed helm anyway, incorporating the teeth into its weapon. “It’s been a long time.”

Silver Torc rubbed at his arm. The little of his plating that remained was still blackened from his long, long ago encounter with fire. “Yes.” 

Jazz reached over with his good hand and picked at a couple of flakes on his shoulder, something he’d done many times over the ages. It was impossible to tell if the rust that flaked free was his or had simply drifted down on him. 

The two fingers on Jazz’s other hand dipped beneath his own collar faring, tracing the design on the piece of metal he kept like a talisman. Silver Torc watched him. It was the symbol of the Betrayer’s enemies, the one he’d once worn when he was newly dead. He couldn’t remember what color it was. He could only barely remember colors at all. Back then he had worried at it often, flaking the paint off quickly, then rubbing the etching away without noticing or caring that something important was fading. Jazz’s talisman was nearly worn through in places too. He’d carved it into the metal to preserve it when the symbol had faded from his own frame, and he’d had to keep making new ones as they wore out. 

Neither of them knew what number he was on.

The night passed in silence. 

The morning’s light brought with it a peek from one of the intruders. The horde stirred, but the femme stayed out of range, merely looking in. 

“So uh… Oh spirits of fallen warriors. Honored ancestors. My unquiet kin,” she recited formally. “Please, uh, accept these offerings of treasure, food, and the comforts of the living. Be jealous no more.” Tiny chips of an unfamiliar metal, faintly glowing ration cubes, and strips of cloth clattered from the femme’s hands onto the floor of the tomb. 

“Um… go on,” she urged after a long moment. The majority of the horde did nothing but glare upward at her, though one of the legless and a couple of scuttling feet started climbing the walls so they could pounce on her if she made the mistake of actually leaning into the tomb. “Accept them. Please? Ican’tdotherestofthespelluntilyouacceptthem.”

The mention of a spell caught Silver Torc’s interest and Jazz’s too. What was she trying to do? The only way to end their curse was for the master to rise or be reborn… right? Silver Torc’s curiosity rippled through the horde as a surrus of sound, but none of the Empties stepped forward to “accept” the offerings. 

“Um… okay.” The femmed ducked back out of sight.

“Are they trying to release us?”

“I expect they’re just trying to make us go away,” Silver Torc answered Jazz. It was futile, of course. Nothing could release them.

Jazz growled, cursing himself quietly for hoping before Silver Torc felt him redirect his anger at the readily available targets above them. “Well we’re not going away.”

“No we are not.” Silver Torc just felt tired. “Protect the tomb.”

The would-be intruders tried a few more… folk rituals over the next few days. The hole accumulated a pile of rosary beads, blessed spark symbol necklaces, photographs, more exotic food, and other odds and ends as they tried to get the Empties to disperse, go away, or spontaneously disappear to no avail. 

“Hey, we know another way that doesn’t work,” one of them, which the others called Indie, remarked after his latest ritual failed to elicit any sort of change in the waiting horde. “Are we recording all of this? It’s going to be a fantastic dissertation on historical magic for the three of us when we get back to the university! I was thinking we could publish…” 

Jazz wondered briefly what a “university” was as Indie moved out of earshot. Silver Torc couldn’t muster the energy to care.

“So, uh, Empties?” the one called Beachcomber called down after a couple of weeks. “Or do you prefer, um, lemure? Hant? Mane?”

The horde did not answer. 

“I mean… a mane is an honored spirit and a lemure is an unburied dead and an Empty is just a frame… “

“It doesn’t matter,” Ironhide called from just out of sight.

“It  _ does,” _ Beachcomber retorted. “I’m trying to be respectful!”

Ironhide scoffed.

“I just,” the little mech turned his full attention back to the horde. “I wanted to ask: what, you know, do you want? You’ve spurned all our sacrifices and stuff, so… is there something you need to be appeased?”

Silver Torc stepped forward, for the first time revealing himself to be more than just one of the mindless guardians. “Be gone from this place!” he yelled back up. His clenched fist and the tense door betrayed how hard he had to fight the compulsion to simply  _ kill _ to speak up. But the intruders weren’t in the tomb. “We exist to protect the tomb and serve the master and none are allowed to intrude upon his rest!”

“Serve—” ~~_the General_~~ Silver Torc ignored the incongruent thought in the other Empty’s mind “—the master, protect the tomb!” Jazz called out. He was sure there would be no dissuading them though, and Silver Torc agreed. They’d come with the express purpose of breaching the tomb and they hadn’t abandoned it when they found it occupied by mythical horrors. “Leave now!”

“What if we promise not to touch anything? We’ll just do some drawings and take some scans and then leave.” Beachcomber sounded hopeful. “I’m really only interested in the rocks. Did they make the artifacts out of the same stuff as the walls? Where was it quarried? We could leave offerings for the ‘master’.”

“What?” Ironhide growled. “No ruttin’ way I’m leaving ‘offerings to the Primus-damned Fallen!”

“Well we don’t know for  _ sure _ this is the Fallen’s tomb,” Beachcomber soothed. “And it’s respectful. You should be respectful when you come into someone’s home, right? Especially when it has such magnificent and formidable guardians.”

“It is disrespectful to enter!” It was death to enter. What was wrong with these people? 

“Um, okay.” 

The following day, Beachcomber and Glyph, the femme, looked down into the tomb again. “Guardians? Is that a better name? So if we can’t come in, maybe you guys could answer some questions for us? I really want to know where they quarried the stone from. And how did they get it all here? Our understanding is that the technology for hauling these sorts of slabs didn’t exist yet…”

Jazz glanced at Silver Torc. “Are we seriously going to play twenty questions with these idiots?”

“No.” The commander glared upward. His being was in full agreement about that. The spell wouldn’t let him negotiate with the intruders, and Silver Torc didn’t want to discuss his life, his death, his  _ slavery _ with a bunch of neonates for whom it was all just a curiousity, a footnote in whatever history had been built up or lost since Primus had created the Primes and the Primes had created the first generations. 

“Alright, um, maybe something else first then? Was the stone chosen for its physical properties or for some special significance?”

Jazz outright laughed at him for that one; Silver Torc didn’t think it was funny. They hadn’t been the ones to build the benighted place, just the ones cursed to watch over it. 

“How about your names?” Glyph implored shyly. “I have a friend doing a project on ancient names and how they changed over time. We don’t have any primary sources from this period. You could be invaluable.” 

Silver Torc growled, and the horde growled and hissed with him. How dare—!

“Okay, no names!” Beachcomber backtracked quickly. “Um… Maybe you could tell us what happened to the outer maze? Some of the damage is obviously from earthquakes and floods, but the collapse doesn’t look right for any sort of natural disaster I know of…” 

Maze? There wasn’t a— “Armies and explosives aren’t  _ natural _ disasters,” Jazz muttered. Oh. That maze. The one Jazz thought they’d once patrolled, but Silver Torc didn’t remember.

“Or did you not guard the maze, just the tomb? We found—”

The horde lurched into sudden motion as Silver Torc felt more intruders on the other side of the tomb. A distraction! He left a small squad to guard these too-curious idiots and turned the rest toward the northwest corner of the central chamber. 

There, where they’d dropped down from a new opening in the ceiling _ onto the sarcophagus, _ were the other two intruders.

“Frag!” Ironhide cursed, taking aim and blasting the first empty that limped into view. Pieces of its fragile frame flew in every direction. “Hurry up and find that anchor, because we ain’t got a lot of time!”

“I’m hurrying!” Indie leaped down from the stone cist, some sort of electro whip uncoiling to defend himself with. “Knowing when the tomb’s been broken into must be part of the spell!”

“I’d guessed!”

Undead swarmed over the rubble. They charged toward the intruders, slowly but inexorably gaining ground on them. Ironhide picked them off one, two, three at a time, blowing bodies to bits, but the bits that could still move resumed the charge. Indie lashed out with his whip, picking up those at the front of the line and throwing them back on the rest, but it was only a delaying tactic and he was distracted, frantically flipping through the pages of—

“He’s got the book!” Jazz shouted, ducking for cover behind one of the mindless. It blew apart right in front of him and pieces of it forced their way into him, un-living living shrapnel. 

Silver Torc hissed, and the horde hissed with him. The two legless scrambled across the ceiling, and a coordinated surge of the horde forced Ironhide to focus on the larger collection of Empties before he could impede their progress. Meanwhile several of the disjointed, skittering feet wove their way through the guardians’ legs to dart across the distance to Indie. The whip successfully broke one to pieces, but the others latched onto his leg and started stabbing. 

“Ahh!” 

The two legless dropped down onto Indie, screeching and clawing. 

Indie scrambled back and lashed out with his whip, catching one of his partially dismembered attackers and wrapping it to throw back into the horde. But Silver Torc had seen that now, so instead of continuing to claw its way at the living mech as it would have on its own, the legless twisted itself, wrapping around the whip in turn and entangling them both, rendering the weapon useless.

“No! I can’t— Ironhide!”

“I can’t let up on these or they’ll swarm us both, kid!”

Indie dropped the entangled whip to kick out at the scuttling feet and scramble away from the second legless rushing at him. “I can’t read and fight at the same time!”

“Frag!” A shot blew the legless into shards of wiggling struts. Ironhide was back to firing on the larger concentration of Empties within just a few seconds, but that was all the time the horde needed to reach the edge of the dais, Jazz and Silver Torc among them. “Frag!”

“I think that one’s the commander!” Indie called out, scrambling back up on top of the sarcophagus to hide behind Ironhide while he flipped frantically through the book. Empties circled, surrounding them, determined to rend and claw and  _ kill the intruders! _ “Shoot it!” 

“Which one!?!”

“The black one with the sword!” 

Ironhide took aim.

_ “No!”  _ Jazz grabbed the Empty next to him and threw it just as Ironhide fired, hurling it into the path of the blast headed straight for the General. It was blown apart into shrapnel, some of which had enough articulation to inch along the ground, still compelled to service. 

“Frag!” Ironhide cursed. “Where—?” he scanned the crowd for Jazz for just a moment, but then was forced to abandon his search for the other awake and aware Empty when one of the mindless reached the sarcophagus. “We could really use that binding spell now?”

“This is definitely the spell anchor, but I’m not seeing a binding or unbinding or a… this might work!” Indie kicked the headless Empty which had crawled up the side of the sarcophagus, only to be forced back by another mindless armed with what was left of a polearm. He bumped into Ironhide, fouling his second attempt at taking out the General. 

Silver Torc/Prowl forced the remaining Empties and their fragments forward. Ironhide’s weapon was devastating, devastating enough to overcome the undead’s inherent resistance to damage even if it couldn’t destroy them completely. The only chance he had at winning this was in overwhelming the two mechs with sheer numbers… numbers that dwindled with every shot Ironhide took. 

It was like fighting the Betrayer had been. Armed with the Requiem Blaster that could level mountains and put gouges in planets, the fallen Prime had been the sort of opponent that could only be met with overwhelming numbers and suicidal determination. Every shot he’d made was a kill or more, and Silver Torc/Prowl’s only hope then had been piling on enough combatants to hold him down until one of the other Primes came to finish him off. Silver Torc/Prowl had never managed to hold him that long. The army had been mortals and the Betrayer a demigod, but they had all sworn their lives to try… 

“Primus-damnit, just read it!” Shots slowed as the mech was forced into melee with the Empties crawling up onto the great, stone cist. Ironhide kicked one, shot another, blowing it apart. Two more clutched at his legs and feet, trying to drag him down. The Empties had their undead vigor, but after an eternity of service, they were physically fragile and nearly weaponless. Ironhide’s cannon was as powerful against them as the Requiem Blaster had been against the healthier, well-equipped army attempting to swarm the Betrayer.

“Okay! Okay!” Indie huddled down, unlike the arrogant necromancers who had recited these spells in ages past. Those had stood, even if they stood in their master’s protection like cowards. “Mitne ekess bilaes. Iski ekess bilaes.” 

Silver Torc/Prowl recognized the first words of a necromantic battle spell. The horde shrieked. More Empties, including the quick-moving legless which was no longer entangled in the whip, crawled up the side of the stone box. They clutched and grabbed and clawed, attempting to bring Indie down while Ironhide fought the tide of them.

“Aurix ekess bilaes. Kovgam ekess bilaes.” 

The horde surged again, scrambling over each other in their eagerness to rip into the two intruders. 

“Drihli ekess bilaes.” 

Fighting against the flow of the charge now, Jazz forced his way toward— “General! You need to take cover!”

Silver Torc/Prowl couldn’t. There was no cover to be had. That spell would destroy everything that moved it if it was completed. “We need to take them down!” He started to climb the stone himself. 

“Damn it!” Jazz wasn’t going to be able to reach the General. The only way he could protect him was to keep Indie from finishing—

“Bilaes ekess bilaes!”

Nothing happened. 

“No!” Indie screamed as he lost his own struggle to keep from being overwhelmed and the Empties started ripping him apart. Blood spilled on the tomb. 

The sarcophagus cracked. 

Then its two halves blew apart, sending Ironhide and Indie’s corpse flying in opposite directions and shattering what was left of the great statue. Inside was another, more ornate sarcophagus made of gold. Inlays and gems flew everywhere from the force of it hitting the ground, spilling the mummy within. The death mask of the Betrayer glared at them all, slightly askew from the decayed frame’s shoulders. 

Ironhide shoved an Empty off, only for it to crumble into dust. He overbalanced and fell against another, also trying to rise, and it crumbled too. The undead screeched around him, but as they each came into contact with him, or each other, they rusted away into nothing. 

The chamber was in chaos, but there was a strange, quiet calm in Jazz’s mind. He picked his way across the room, carefully avoiding the rapidly dwindling number of guardians until he reached… “General? Is it…?” 

“Over?” the blackened Empty shook his head. The binding still gripped him, though it was only a matter of seconds — seconds… such a strange concept — before his frame failed. “We serve the master,” he spat. He held his hand out to Jazz. “I died on my feet, in battle. I want to face this fate standing as well.”

Jazz reached back, his hand shaking. “I don’t want to face it alone.”

Prowl grasped it and hauled himself up. Already they both were starting to crumble from the touch. “You’re a good saboteur,” he murmured, putting what was left of his failing weight onto Jazz’s failing frame. He was on his feet. “Scout ahead for me?”

“I will.” Jazz focused on the order, holding it between himself and the rapidly approaching darkness. He was losing feeling, going numb and for the first time since he’d died, truly cold. “I’ll report when you… find…” 

Their dust fell together to the floor to mingle with the others’, and with the dust of ages. Ironhide was left alone in the tomb of the Fallen.

Or so it seemed.

Because, though his body was gone, Prowl was still bound to service until the Betrayer rose or reincarnated. Silently he haunted the tomb, unable to do anything but watch as Beachcomber and Glyph came in to retrieve the bodies of Indie and the two mechs who had been ripped apart upon opening the tomb. 

In the days and weeks that followed, more mechs came: government agents and investigators and more archeologists who poked and prodded everything. The binding tormented Prowl when they hauled the mummy off to be displayed, demanding that he keep the master in the tomb and protect him even as it forced him to stay behind and be separated from him. It was a relief when it finally relented, defeated by the distance.

They never did find the Requiem Blaster, buried deep beneath the ruins beyond their excavations.

Prowl watched and he waited.

This time when the tomb quieted there was nothing left. Even the walls had been scraped clean of their faded and worn carvings, and they filled in the space with dirt. 

Darkness. 

.

.

.

##  The Reincarnation

.

.

.

“—ou know, when I first saw that note about  _ absentmindedness _ in your file, I didn’t believe it!” Ratchet ranted, sorting his tools into a drawer. Prowl blinked, wondering how he’d gotten from… the hall? was that where he’d been this time? … to the medbay. “You! Absentminded! With your frickkin’ down-to-the-second schedules… but nooo. One tiny thing goes off-schedule and you crash! Except, as usual, this wasn’t a true  _ crash!” _

Prowl watched him as he ran the usual series of checks. How long had he been unresponsive? Just four hours this time, according to the display on the medbay wall; he didn’t trust his internal chronometer, since it often froze or glitched during these episodes. With that information, he began updating his schedule so that he could get back on track. 

“I’d be able to  _ do _ something about a crash,” Ratchet continued ranting. “Because that’s a  _ medical _ problem, but you’re just—”

“The score was fourteen to six,” Prowl said, answering the question Ratchet had asked in the commissary yesterday. He had meant to answer at the time while they were drinking their fuel together, he really had, but he’d had a meeting with Optimus Prime that couldn’t be delayed so he’d put their conversation on hold and walked out. 

Ratchet just made another frustrated sound. He stomped over to the privacy curtain and flung it open. “Jazz! Get in here!”

A mech Prowl was fairly sure he’d never met before peeked in. He didn’t know him at all… and yet, Prowl had the weirdest feeling that he’d been looking for this mech for years. He almost asked him to report, though there was nothing for him to report on. He didn’t even know what division the mech was in. 

“You two idiots,” Ratchet waved at them and started heading for the door, “keep each other from doing something stupid while I…” His voice faded as he stomped away down the hall. 

Unbothered (and Ratchet scolded  _ him _ for leaving conversations unfinished) Prowl examined his new minder. He was a lithe, graceful mech with a bright blue optic band and a quick, easy smile, but he stood stiffly, his small doorwings braced as if against a heavy weight. “Hi,” he said in a warm voice that inexplicably slipped past the detachment Prowl felt in social situations and made him feel less alone. “You doing alright there, mech?”

“I have twenty minutes left in medical before I have to report to the command center,” Prowl replied. 

“You sure? The Hatchet doesn’t usually let mechs walk out before he’s done with them.” 

The mech, Jazz, looked unconcerned and, to all appearances, uninjured despite his stiff posture. Why was he here? 

Irrelevant.

“I have exactly twenty minutes before I need to be in the command center,” Prowl repeated. “I need to get back on schedule.” Otherwise he’d zone out again, and who knew when he’d connect back up with his schedule next. He stretched his doorwings. He always expected them to be stiff, or even injured, but they moved easily and fluidly. It continually surprised him when his frame actually worked as it had been designed when he couldn’t seem to shake his fatigue. Ratchet nagged at him to take it easy and get more rest but… His tiredness never ebbed or peaked. 

But there was no point dwelling on that again when there was nothing he could do about it. Prowl considered Jazz instead. There was something… “Nightmares?” he guessed. 

“Hmm. The kind I don’t remember and that don’t leave any fragments behind in my processor. Doc hates it, it doesn’t give him anything to work with.” Jazz tilted his head, blue visor bright. “How’d you know?”

“I’m not sure.” There was just something familiar about him, a stillness in how he held himself without fidgeting that reminded Prowl of himself. “A guess.” 

“A good one.” 

Silence fell between them. Prowl counted off the seconds, waiting for Jazz to fill it. 

“What stupid something am I supposed to be stopping you from doing?” Jazz finally asked, long after the point other mechs would have felt awkward and compelled to say something.

Prowl, so often responsible for such awkward-for-others-but-somehow-not-for-him silences, only noticed the pause because it exceeded his “resume conversation” alert. “Given what brought me here, I would guess you’re supposed to prevent me from zoning out again.” He debated to himself, going over every other possibility he could think of. After several minutes he didn’t have anything more likely, and so asked Jazz, “What stupidity am I supposed to be preventing you from committing?”

“Wandering off, probably. He’s been trying to get me to come in for awhile but I keep losing track of time and missing my appointments.”

Prowl frowned, looking Jazz over again. He looked healthy enough, but there was something nagging at him, like it nagged him about his own nonexistent injuries, that he… shouldn’t be as healthy as he looked. “Does your frame feel stiff?” he asked. “You’re standing like it feels stiff.”

Surprise flashed across Jazz’s visor. “Sometimes it does, yeah. Doc can’t find a reason for that either.” He raised his arms and flexed his fingers slowly, deliberately. Three of the digits on one hand caught briefly, jerking to full extension instead of uncurling smoothly. “It’s hard to get moving from a cold start, you know?”

“Yes.” Prowl left it at that. He knew that feeling all too well.

They lapsed into looking at each other in near-perfect quiet, interrupted only by the beeping and other normal medbay sounds. Prowl knew most mechs felt uncomfortable with long silences. There was some social cue Prowl was missing that made them speak or to fidget, or at least avert their gaze from Prowl’s steady stare. Prowl had never felt the need to fill in the quiet just because it was there. Apparently neither did Jazz, because he seemed perfectly comfortable to wait with Prowl until one of them found some actual, legitimate reason to break the pause.

Ratchet returned first. His mood was only slightly improved when he stalked in and soured again when he stopped short of the two two of them just looking at each other. “Frag, Prowl. You couldn’t go ten minutes without antagonizing him?”

“Eight minutes and forty-three seconds,” Prowl corrected automatically, the imprecise estimation of time grating on him. And how would it have been  _ his _ fault if they didn’t get along? Really? That was unfair… even if it was often true. 

“He wasn’t antagonizing me,” Jazz said in unexpected defense. “We were talking.”

“You were glaring at each other. Ugh.” They were? Ratchet ran a scan over Prowl’s frame. “How long until you’re back on schedule?” he asked, resigned. 

“Eight minutes and twenty-four seconds, and I really can’t afford any further disruptions today.” 

“Fine. As usual there’s nothing actually wrong with you, but you will  _ sit there _ until you’re back on track before you go, and you  _ will  _ notify me if you have any more issues, understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” Ratchet reached out to snag Jazz by the arm and drag him behind another privacy curtain. “And you’re not escaping me this time!”

“I wasn’t trying to escape! Honest!”

“Pull the other one,” Ratchet scoffed, yanking the curtain shut around them. “It’s got bells.” 

Seven minutes and two seconds left.

The curtain, of course, did very little to muffle the sound of Jazz’s voice, and he made no effort to lower it. “What did you want to see me for anyway?”

“What did—” Ratchet grunted and audibly swallowed his frustration. “It’s been  _ two years _ since your last check up, you little pain in the aft. You’re supposed to come in at least once every six months!”

“Noooo, it can’t have been two years. Can it?” Jazz sounded genuinely confused. “My last checkup was only…” 

“Two years, three months—”

“Fifteen days, seven hours, four minutes, twenty-seven seconds ago,” Prowl finished helpfully, having pulled up the file to check. He opened up the rest of the file, curious about Jazz’s service record. Sparked a few decades earlier than he had been. He’d been a police officer, then trained as a scout when he joined the Autobots. Now — if Prowl was reading around all the redacted text correctly — he was in spec ops as a saboteur. Why did that sound familiar…?

“You stay out of this,” Ratchet called out before addressing Jazz again. “And don’t try to argue that injuries count as medical attention. You don’t get vaccines while you’re bleeding out!”

“Maybe you could combine them for me next time. Seriously, Ratch, I’m not doing it on purpose! My commander is on me all the time for missing little things like that . It’s just how my processor works.”

“Combine—!”

“Ow!”

“Don’t move! I’m  _ combining _ your next year’s worth of boosters right now.”

Jazz continued to whine, but apparently complied enough that Ratchet didn’t chastise him again. 

Five minutes, forty seconds. Prowl couldn’t stay and listen any longer. Nor did he say goodbye to either Jazz or Ratchet. Sometimes mechs got upset when he didn’t, but he’d always felt that goodbyes were for permanent partings, not short interruptions. He just stood from his berth and left the medbay, headed for the command center at a calculated pace.

He passed Ironhide coming the other direction fifty-three seconds later. “Heya, Prowl.”

Prowl was rather confused by the greeting as always — why did people greet him so  _ often? — _ but continued their conversation gamely. “It’s black.” 

But now Ironhide looked confused too. “What’s black?”

“The new air transport you were asking about,” Prowl reminded him. Was Ironhide having memory issues? He’d only asked about it a week ago. 

“The new— you don’t need to tell me now, I’ve already seen it.” Ironhide shook his head. “Never mind. Where are you off to?”

“Command center. I’m on duty there until—”

“Shift change, right?” Ironhide interrupted. It was an accurate reference of time, if not the precise one Prowl would have prefered. “Don’t let me keep you then, I know how you hate bein’ late.” Ironhide clapped his shoulder and continued walking, leaving Prowl with the sense that he should have collapsed under the relatively minimal force. His frame was a sturdy police frame, designed for high speed chases and crashes. He knew he wasn’t delicate! But his legs felt thin, weak, like he was standing on single struts.

The fatigue persisted even after he reached the command center, and Prowl leaned tiredly against his terminal as he worked. Several mechs suggested he go down to medical, get more rest, but he wasn’t scheduled for rest for another six hours, and didn’t have a medical checkup scheduled for another month. Besides, resting never seemed to help. Nor could medics ever find something wrong with his frame. One had suggested it was psychosomatic and referred him to the base’s therapist. 

He was still seeing the mech, dutifully calling in his appointments every month over a secure communications app. It didn’t help.

Second by second, minute by minute, he got through the rest of his shift. Signing out was a distinct relief and he left the command center promptly. It was three hundred and twenty seven steps, exactly five and a half minutes at his regular walking speed, to the commissary. 

Two thirds of the way there, he turned a corner and saw a mech standing in the middle of the hall. His back was to the wall, braced against it like it was the only thing holding him up as he stared straight ahead, humming softly.

“You were waiting for me,” Prowl guessed as he approached Jazz. He didn’t slow, though. He had a schedule to keep. 

“I… think I was.” Jazz turned his head and looked at him. “You have a schedule.”

“Yes. I have one minute to get to the commissary, three more to serve, ten to eat, fifteen to get to my quarters, then twenty for self care, an hour for leisure, then eight for recharge,” assuming he could recharge, “then I need to get up.” Prowl forced himself to stop talking before he listed out all of tomorrow’s schedule as well. People seemed to get frustrated with that, and he had several classified meetings he should not talk about in a public hall. 

“Wow. I’d never be able to keep track of all that.” Prowl drew even with Jazz, but the other mech made no move to push off the wall, either to follow or accompany him. “Have you always done that?”

“I have to,” Prowl said firmly. It wasn’t easy to do, but when he didn’t… “I lose track if I’m not paying attention.” Then he went catatonic and woke up in medbay several hours, or on one memorable occasion several weeks, later. He could keep track of a battlefield down to the smallest detail, down to the nanosecond, but he couldn’t regulate how much time he spent eating, or sleeping, or showering without scheduling precisely how long each task  _ should _ take. Couldn’t remain grounded in the present without that constant reminder.

“Yeah? You too?” Jazz’s posture straightened a little but he still didn’t move away from the wall, content to watch as Prowl walked past him. “What do you know.”

It wasn’t a question and Prowl didn’t answer.

Then they were past each other and couldn’t continue the conversation.

A week and a half, a battle, and another catatonic episode later, Prowl came upon Jazz again in the hall. It shouldn’t have been remarkable. He passed many people in the hall, and now that Jazz had been transferred to this base, encountering each other was inevitable. But again, he felt like Jazz had been waiting for him.

“How about you?” he asked, continuing their conversation. He was prepared to remind Jazz of what they were talking about, like he had to remind most mechs. And they called  _ him _ absentminded!

But Jazz answered seamlessly. “I lose track of time when I’m alone,” he said without confusion or even an odd look. It was a remarkably refreshing change. “I don’t have all that great a sense of it when I’m with people either, but when there’s others around it doesn’t matter as much because they keep time for me.”

“Interesting. You said it’s always been that way?” Actually, Prowl wasn’t sure he had said it, but it was something he somehow knew… 

“Yup. Not because I don’t care — couldn’t tell you how many COs and medics I’ve told that to — but I can’t help it when everything feels like…”

“Like it’s hard to focus on anything. There’s too much happening, and not enough, and you just want to stand there for a while and… wait.” Prowl wasn’t sure why he confessed it to Jazz, but the other mech looked as tired, as worn out, as uncertain of reality, as he sometimes felt. Like he was simultaneously present but distant. Distracted, like he was searching for the source of an ache he couldn’t soothe.

A quiet “Yeah,” followed Prowl as he continued to his meeting and he sighed. At least his need to keep everything on schedule had translated into a skill at keeping troops and supplies organized and on schedule as well. Armies were logistics much more than they were battlefield tactics or even soldiers. 

Four days later he saw Jazz again in the exact same place, as though he hadn’t moved at all. Prowl knew that wasn’t actually the case, that he must have left to serve his shifts, go to meals… He was used to everyone around him not following schedules when they were off-duty, but Jazz… He wasn’t there at regular intervals, but it  _ felt  _ like a routine. A routine they shared.

“It doesn’t matter how long you wait though,” Jazz said when Prowl came into earshot. “The wait is all there is, inevitable. It takes as long as it takes.”

“Yes.” Prowl shivered.

One of Jazz’s arms moved this time, reaching up to brush his collar faring. He didn’t seem to be aware that he was doing it. “It’s heavy.”

“Yes.” Prowl mirrored the gesture, then his hand drifted higher to touch a spot that always felt rubbed raw. When he was younger he’d worn a gorget there, and that had felt almost better, but they weren’t in fashion and the medics had made him stop when the silver alloy had started actually chafing his plating. 

He didn’t see Jazz again for several months. 

The Decepticons broke through and bombed the base on their next big offensive. They shelled the city’s protective dome, and nearly broke through before the seekers were driven off by the anti-aircraft turrets. Then they’d advanced with their tanks, and it had taken days of heavy fighting to repel them. There had been explosions behind the Decepticons’ combat lines, an ammunition dump falling to stray artillery fire or sabotage. Despite that, they hadn’t retreated and had to be driven out of Iacon inch by inch, incurring heavy casualties on both sides. The outer layers of Iacon were wrecked. It was gruelling, nonstop, exhausting; there was no time for rest or repairs until it was finally over.

Thoroughly spent, Prowl sank down to sit against the wall near medbay to wait his turn for treatment. He held his hand against his side where he’d nearly been blasted open, but the wound felt unnaturally numb. He felt cold. Most of his frame was covered in soot and ash, blackening his usually white paint. His acid pellet rifle laid across his lap, almost forgotten. 

He should have been frantically redoing his schedule, updating everything so he didn’t get lost again, but… “I’m tired, Jazz,” he said, confident the other mech was there. 

Jazz’s hand came to rest gently on his shoulder. Prowl didn’t look up, but he could see several shredder discs lodged in his plating in his peripheral vision, like he’d had to shield himself at some point with his arm. “Me too, General.”

_ Colonel. _ Prowl almost corrected him, should have corrected him, but didn’t. Jazz sat down with him and started to clean the soot off his plating with his fingers. 

And together, they waited.


End file.
